Making the grade: Coventry Cathedral

Dubbed 'the Festival of Britain at prayer', this is the church that rose again. Keith Miller reports

A church where the congregation includes a car and a streaker could hardly be accused of flinching from the issue of diversity. A couple of years ago, a grand service at Coventry Cathedral had the scheduled guest attraction of a Mini, trundling down the aisle as bold as brass as if this was The Italian Job, and the unscheduled one of a protester against I forget what, who chose this most sacred of moments to put the building's central-heating system to the test. Let's hope Rowan Williams was glued to his television at the time.

Coventry has a unique significance for Britons of a certain age. Conceived as an emblem of national rebirth after the original Gothic church - and much of the town around it - was bombed in 1940, the new building was exempted from some of the bitterest criticisms launched at modern architecture elsewhere.

It was designed by Basil Spence in the early 1950s and consecrated in 1962. Packed to the rafters with fashionable art of the period - someone dubbed it "the Festival of Britain at prayer" - it has certainly dated since. But it is as resolutely of its time as a Georgian townhouse.

Spence's big idea was to retain the ruins of the old church (it was only made a cathedral in 1918, when Coventry became a city) as a kind of porch or narthex for the new one. This meant that his design was orientated north-south rather than east-west, as tradition would dictate.

Nothing wrong with that in itself; but Spence was also influenced by the gently mystical attitude to Nature evident in much Scandinavian modernist design of the earlier 20th century.

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In various smaller church projects, he put full-length, clear-glass walls at one or both ends of the structure, so the infinite majesty of the Lord's creation could be disclosed to the worshippers inside. He repeated the formula on a grand scale at Coventry.

The gap between the old and new churches was bridged by a high portico, and the "liturgical west" (south) end of the new building was entirely faced in clear glass, delicately etched by John Hutton.

This means that the midday sun, even if it doesn't quite rage with tropical ferocity in the West Midlands, comes straight into the new cathedral, drowning out the subtler effects of the stained-glass windows which run along the side walls in clever tilted bays, and making Ray-Bans a desirable item of priestly apparel. (Maybe the nude worshipper I saw on television was just working on her tan?)

Elsewhere, Spence bent over backwards to make something which, while recognisably modern, relates to tradition in such a way as to send out messages about continuity and renewal (and not to frighten the horses, of course). The church is faced in the same pink sandstone as its predecessor. Ancient forms and techniques are retained: in the slit-shaped windows, the crisscrossed, wooden vault, the battlement-like profile of the portico, the use of mosaic and stained glass.

It is not a building without faults. When it was built, many people said it was too modern, while some said it wasn't modern enough. Nowadays it is an object of the kind of cosy affection usually felt for much older buildings - as well, inevitably, as more complex feelings on the part of those who lived through the war.

It was Grade I-listed as early as 1988: an outstanding if imperfect piece of architecture, and an eloquent historical document.